Esotropiart

Esotropiart is constantly evolving and changing, pretty much on a whim as I see fit. Sometimes I'll get in a creative mood and fool around with one of the key graphical elements, coming up with several different possible variations (other times I'll regurgitate petunias when looking at my old work and not rest until I have improved it). Today I started fooling around with the logo. Sometimes when you are fooling around with random graphical elements, you get lucky and find something you like. Such was the case with the "V-Rose Triceratopia Logo", as I suddenly call it.

Fireworks is a great program for fooling around and achieving awesome accidental (or purposeful) effects. I had the idea to make some light beams coming out of the moon behind the "art" and ended up with this cool little design. Just for the record, here's how I came up with the logo, step-by-step.

1. Created a large circle path and filled it with a conical gradient fill that had three beam-like branches.
2. Put a black triangle with curved, concave sides on each of the beams to give them interesting cut-offs (bell-bottoms). Note: to position each triangle in the correct position, I copied the first one and moved its rotation center to the center of the moon circle and rotated it until it matched up with the next beam.
3. Added small glow to each of the concave triangles and erased the glow from the outside edge, so the glow affected only the two sides that formed a point up the beams.
4. Flattened group of three beams with triangular cut-offs an applied a medium strength zoom blur to take out the hard edges
5. Duplicated the triple beam twice, scaled, rotated and faded out transparency on larger ones.
6. Ta Da!

The new logo appears as a new bottom left corner element on all the newly designed pages (home and blog).